A new breed of fast family car
We used to be driving ourselves dizzy up here in trick Mitsubishi Lancer Evos and Subaru Imprezas on steroids, relatively affordable fast cars that loomed large inside our heads and on our bedroom walls. Ten years on, however, the once untouchable four-door Japanese batmobiles are about as en vogue as a Nokia 3110 mobile phone or Rio MP3 player. Instead, the compact crackerjacks most petrolheads embrace in 2013 still can be had with four doors, four-wheel drive and turbocharged four-cylinder engines, but they are no longer street-legal derivatives of rally-bred icons made in the Far East. It’s Deutschland über Alles these days, premium eclipsing mainstream, Freude durch Kraft dressed up in more socially acceptable formats. Offering a similar mix of exciting dynamics, engineering excellence and fire-breathing performance, the latest masters of the super-GTI segment are the 296bhp Audi S3, the 316bhp BMW M135i, and the new (and utterly rampant) 355bhp Mercedes A45 AMG. Gentlemen, start your engines for a two-day, no-holds-barred shootout on the Dolomites’ finest tyre-shredding, brake-eating turf.
Normally in June, all passes connecting Italy to Austria and Switzerland are open, but since this spring is an autumn which has been pulled forward, evidently erasing summer in the process, we had virtually the entire Alps to ourselves. Wherever a sign read ‘Road closed due to snow’ there was 15-20 miles of virtually traffic-free dream territory lying ahead. Add to this a felt 50 miles of visibility and you’re on the threshold of driver’s paradise. It’s the perfect place to showcase just how much the hot hatch has changed: in 1976 the first VW Golf GTI had 110bhp; the new Mk7 GTI has 217bhp; but now this mad AMG Merc has 355bhp.
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